Loving Audio Books But Not The Segregation of Books and Literature

© 2010 by Alice Walker

I woke this morning thinking of two recent audio books that I admire:  The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai and The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani.  I listened to both these books over the summer and they have haunted me ever since.  They are quite strong medicine and unquestionably powerful, if not for everyone. 

The one set mostly in India tells more than I sometimes could absorb about the challenges of immigrating to this country from India, if you are poor; the other, set in ancient Iran, follows the life of a peasant village woman who develops into a designer and maker of fine carpets in a society that demands that, outside her house, she be completely subservient to men and also wear the chador.

It is a wonderful thing to be read to, and the narrators chosen for these novels, set in modern day India (and Manhattan) and 17^th  century Persia (Iran) are superb.  It is easy enough to Google reviews, so I won’t attempt one here, and for all I know these books met with great notice and acclaim when they first appeared. I hope so.

I recently committed my own novel of twenty-eight years ago, The Color Purple, to audio: it is now available from Recorded Books.  The novel has had a long life as a book, then as a movie and then as a Broadway Musical (and still touring); the circle completes itself with the book read/told by me, as messenger from ancestors and kin I knew little of at the time of the story’s unfolding (before my birth), but loved nonetheless.

In my passion to locate more books by writers from other cultures I took a turn around the Kindle and Amazon sites, to discover something that seems truly amazing: books by black authors are segregated by race!  This would be hilarious if it were not so troubling.  If, after all of our struggle to integrate into this questionable system we may enter a bookstore and stand anywhere, but our books must reside in a corner, the world has not changed nearly as much as I, for one, assumed it had.

There are writers from Iran, Japan, Ireland, England, India, China, Israel, Korea, Tibet etc., all listed and shown to be writers of Literature.  But when looking for my own novel (which world wide has sold perhaps fifteen million copies) I found it tucked away with twelve or so books by other African Americans under African American Literature.  To make matters worse, no one had bothered to read the book to verify the narrative.  A synopsis has the main character raped by her father rather than by her stepfather (her father was lynched when she was an infant) a point that is crucial to comprehending the dynamics of the heroine’s rise from disaster.

I had noticed this segregation before, disturbingly in a Borders bookstore in Berkeley/Emeryville.  There books by African Americans, all twenty-five or so of them, were stuffed into a dingy circular kiosk that looked as if it had not been straightened out or freshened in months.

Recalling the child I was who was not allowed into the public library of Eatonton, Georgia, I think of children, especially, who will receive a subliminal message that somehow literature by African Americans isn’t really Literature.  That it is a separate and smaller, i.e. lesser, creation. 

What could be the rationale for such segregation, today, 2010, when our president and first lady and their children are African American?  When Oprah Winfrey sells more books by writers of all colors than is even imaginable.  Maybe booksellers assume black people only read books by other black people and want to find them quickly without having to consider what other writing might be going on in the rest of the world. There is also the amusing notion, held by some, that when black writers write about Life it isn’t about Life but about being black.  That this is ridiculous can be determined by thinking – for a moment, no more – that when white writers write about Life they are simply writing about being white.  Imagine how bored Charles Dickens would have been.

It is too late for segregated thinking; it harms by blinding us to what is most useful for us to know: how to survive as feelingly human; how to thrive, worship and dance in this life. As selves unique.

The Color Purple, for instance, whose first words are “Dear God” is about God.  About the need to abandon a God who is incapable of hearing us, and to find a God in Nature who not only listens to us but unfailingly responds.

We are beyond a rigid category of color, sex, or spirituality if we are truly alive.  Not to be alert to the challenges and wonders confronting humans today is to miss what could be the last chance to understand and celebrate the wonderful multi-everything mystery that we are.

The responsibility for changing literary segregation rests with readers.  Would you drink from a segregated water source?  Eat in a segregated restaurant?  Buy a dress where I could not try one on? Buy a book where black writers are discriminated against?

Changing our society and the world is up to us, even in what might appear to be small choices. Any hope of our communal happiness depends on our private honoring, to the best of our knowledge, of the dignity of all, and of what is right.

Alice’s Fall Calendario: August 19th to November 22nd 2010

Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans.... John Lennon


August 19th, Birmingham Alabama:


Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund's 43rd Anniversary Celebration August 10-21, 2010.


A Fundraiser for The Federation of Southern Farming Cooperatives. Alice will accept the 9th Estelle Witherspoon Lifetime Achievement Award in honor of her father, Willie Lee Walker, a farmer who believed in and worked for cooperation among peoples and a Politics of Fairness, as his daughter does.


September 9th, Cape Town, South Africa: 


Alice will deliver the 11th annual Steve Biko lecture on her father’s birthday.  She will be speaking and reading in Johannesburg at an undetermined date.  She will also visit indigenous healers and study rock paintings.


September 15th, Washington, DC: 


Alice will be honored by the Congressional Black Caucus Spouses with a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts. She will accept in honor of her mother's (Mrs. Minnie Lou Walker) sacrifices that enabled her to dedicate her life to writing, travel and activism.  In short, to her own curiosity.



September 26th, Petaluma, Ca: 


Alice will read from her new book of poems published by New World Library: HARD TIMES REQUIRE FURIOUS DANCING; and talk at the annual Petaluma Progressive Festival.


September 30th, New York City: 


Alice will launch her collection of interviews: THE WORLD HAS CHANGED and celebrate with the publishers at The New Press, re: their acquisition of her just finished book THE CHICKEN CHRONICLES: A MEMOIR, Sitting With the Angels Who Have Returned With My Memories.


October 2nd:


Alice Will be celebrating her new book HARD TIMES REQUIRE FURIOUS DANCING (NWL) with a dance conjured by Andy Shallal owner of Busboys and Poets bookstore and the soulful, Zora Neale Hurston inspired Eatonville restaurant across the street. 


October 9th:


Reykjavik, Iceland, John Lennon’s birthday, Alice and Kaleo travel to Iceland where Alice will receive the LennonOno Peace Grant from Yoko Ono which she will give away immediately to a cause dear to her heart. Giving the award away is a condition of the grant.  No doubt the brilliant idea of Yoko Ono, whom Alice has long admired, along with John Lennon, who was a beloved inspiration and teacher for Alice.
  
October 16th:


San Francisco, at Yoshi’s:  Alice will celebrate the local launch of HARD TIMES REQUIRE FURIOUS DANCING with MUCH DANCING to African High Life AND the incomparable INDIA ARIE whose presence is much anticipated! 


October 18-19th:


Atlanta, Emory University:


Alice will share public teachings on Art and Spirituality with His Holiness the Dalai Lama 


November 4th:


San Francisco, reading and talk HARD TIMES REQUIRE FURIOUS DANCING, at The Commonwealth Club.


November 20th-22nd:


London,  The Russell Tribunal on Palestine.   Alice will be a  juror hearing testimony re:  corporate complicity in the destruction of the Palestinian people.


Thanksgiving:  Alice returns to writing poems and growing collard greens. 

this is what you shall do .... Walt Whitman

this is what you shall do: love the earth and the sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning god, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem....

-walt whitman

To Readers of The Chicken Chronicles

The Chicken Chronicles: A Memoir
Sitting With the Angels Who Have Returned With My Memories
©2010 by Alice Walker

And so, Readers of The Chicken Chronicles, our story comes to a pause, but not our adventure in the shared magic of our planet.

I thank you for being present for this unanticipated journey into my memory, history, past. Toward the end of writing The Chronicles I read some of your comments;  I appreciate the warmth and thoughtfulness of your words.  That chickens led me to a deeper healing and understanding of my existence was no more surprising than that you were with us on the way.

Creating a new relationship with the other animals of the planet and repairing what has been so hideously broken between us, is a responsibility inherited by every human.  It is an opportunity to experience joy also as we re-awaken to the wonder of our brothers and sisters in all their splendid forms.

Heroic workers and works that I am deeply grateful for:

PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals)

Food, Inc. (a film I watched twice with pain and gratitude)

Meet Your Meat (a film I could not bear to watch but was happy to see Paul McCartney introducing; he could stand it, so it’s stand-able)

The Vegetarian Myth (a book that opens a bigger space for dialogue over how and what humans eat and what of Nature is destroyed in the process, whether by meat eaters or vegans

Human mistreatment of other animals, especially in the decades of “factory farming” condemns us as a species more than anything else we have done. We have been more brutal to them than we have been to ourselves in war, and that is saying a great deal.

I am a “mostly vegetarian” human; though as a child I thought eating pig and cow three times a day was normal; and chicken every Sunday. When I am required now to eat meat – as a medicine or as unavoidable nourishment in places where having anything at all to eat is miraculous -I do so with awareness and gratitude and with a vow to uncomplainingly take my own turn on the wheel of life feeding on itself when the time comes.  I consciously allow the piece of meat in my mouth to conjure the entire animal from which it came.  I then attempt to imagine its life in detail, which reinforces my commitment to remain in solidarity with what/who I’m eating. I make a promise never to turn away, not from what I’m chewing and not from its living kin. For many, this is too fine a line to walk.  It suits me, however, because I know there are worse things in life than being killed and eaten.  Worse than either is being degraded and abused one’s whole life, one’s beauty, grace and intelligence unacknowledged and denied; treated, at every moment, without gratitude, consideration or respect.

I also know what it means to depend on animals for survival, as they have depended on humans.  In my indigenous and farmer background there was a better understanding of balance and inter-species respect and interdependence than most present day humans can envision.  But perhaps that is returning.

I like the thought that justice that seems almost entirely to have slipped from our hands, might yet reside in our mouths.  That it is the human palate that might decide our fate.  Seen in this light, the square of chocolate we are savoring might connect us to the enslaved children in hot climates who sleep on concrete floors each night after harvesting cocoa beans, whose stolen labor is the foundation of our pleasure.  The sip of delicious coffee each morning that we think of as our right, might connect us to those driven from their lands (to make room for foreign owned coffee plantations) and now roaming the earth, homeless and hungry, for that moment of satisfaction we so enjoy.  We might let our taste buds lead us to interrogate the bloody, land-grabbing, human and animal destroying history (and present) of pineapple and banana.  Or even of tomato and lettuce.

My own response to this dilemma is to grow as much of what I eat as I can, which means a narrower diet than I thought I would have, with collard greens, a tough and hardy vegetable, a mainstay; and to eat less of everything, whether I’ve grown it myself or not.

Namaste;

All my relations,

Alice Walker

For more information about coffee and chocolate:

Global Exchange

Fair Trade Coffee and Chocolate

Thanksgiving Coffee

El Norte (the movie)


The Chicken Chronicles: A Memoir
Sitting With the Angels Who Have Returned With My Memories
© 2010 by Alice Walker
Will be published in 2011 by The New Press.

Worms Won’t Need a Menu

© 2010 by Alice Walker

I am glad

You will never

See

Menus

All over

The world

On which

Your flesh

Appears

In thousands

Of

Seductive

ways.

I console

Myself:  Worms

Won’t need

A menu

To describe

Their human

Dinners.

Still,

I like to imagine

Them

Sitting alert

At table

Reading

Of

Our

Succulence.


A True Likeness, The Black South of Richard Samuel Roberts, a book of arresting photographs of black Americans from the 1920s is one of my favorite books in all the world.  When I saw the cover with the little boy protecting his chicken from the inevitable Sunday dinner I knew Roberts was a kindred spirit who knew and honored our deep tenderness for all that lives.  Which is of course everything!

Ha Ha, Ha Ha, Ha Ha!

The Chicken Chronicles: a Memoir
Sitting With the Angels Who Have Returned With My Memories

Chapter Thirty-Eight

© 2010 by Alice Walker

Dearest Girls,

Ha Ha, Ha Ha, Ha Ha!

That is the sound of Mommy being wrong.

According to the friends with whom she stayed for five days, Rufus had a grand time.  She liked the safe freedom she enjoyed around a more conventional house, not one perched on the edge of the woods like ours, where creatures great and small are likely to jump out of the bushes and grab you.  She liked having the tiny dog to boss around; she liked having a large yard to de-insect all by herself.  She even liked looking for a new place to lay her eggs, apparently her biggest concern.

Returning to the chicken yard she ignored the other chickens, including Agnes of God, and went straight to her nest, which it seemed she had been looking for the whole five days.

Agnes of God, for her part, far from running up to Rufus with sobs of relief and tales of the horrid behavior of the other girls, stayed on her nest, and merely looked over at Rufus as if to say “Oh, you’re back.”

 

So maybe she wasn’t grieving. Maybe she was brooding. Broody.  Sitting on her eggs and hoping they would hatch; they won’t of course because there are no roosters around to fertilize them.  Maybe when Rufus went away for a few days she saw her chance for a bit of tranquility.

As for Gertrude Stein, she seemed unintimidated by the bully’s return.  Mommy noticed as well that tiny pinfeathers at the back of her neck had started to grow.

Mommy had a good laugh at herself.  Fiction writers, and Poets, you know.

It reminded her of the epiphany she felt the first time she saw all of you eating a cracked egg, and then playing with its shell.  The one who had the piece of shell was chased down and tackled by all the others.  And, while she held it in her beak, there was a lot of jumping up and down around her.  This, Mommy thought, had to be how human ball games: football, baseball, soccer, basketball, etc, began, since humans have learned so much of what we know from other animals.  But maybe not. 

Maybe earlier humans (Native Americans and Aboriginals excepted) didn’t pay enough attention to animals to mimic their behavior, though Mommy, witnessing the ruin of the planet caused by human behavior, certainly wished they had. 

Well, Mommies can be mistaken.  Mommies, especially human Mommies, can be wrong.  And there’s a very good reason for this.

It is because human Mommies, like all Mommies on the planet, whether of fish or fowl, insect or reptile, are only surrogates.  In fact, all creatures on the planet have the same parent. 

You demonstrate this to Mommy every day.  Because no matter how much you depend on the mash and grain Mommy provides, no matter how much you enjoy sitting and napping with her, the real excitement comes for you when she opens your gate and you are free to rush into your real mother’s bounty.  The bugs, the grasses, the seeds, the worms, the fallen apples and plums.  It is She that you truly depend on, She whom you innately trust.  Your love of her is so hardwired in you, you probably don’t even notice Her.

It is exactly the same with Mommy, who realizes that she is, like you, only small.

A tiny being hanging (though seeming to walk or even fly in planes) off the side of her Mother.  For Mommy is not the same as Mother, and certainly not the same as The Mother.  The one whose lap is too big to fall out of, whose head is too extraordinary to be fouled by chicken poop, whose mind is too flexible to worry about who gets eaten up and by what. 

This Mother, unlike Mommy, never worries; time is her toy.  Being is her thought.

Even Bullies Are Missed and Loved

 The Chicken Chronicles: A Memoir

Sitting With the Angels Who Have Returned With My Memories

Chapter Thirty-Seven

© 2010 by Alice Walker

Beloved Sister Travelers on the Journey,

The first thing Mommy noticed, after Rufus was sent away, was how relaxed everyone else became.  Especially Gertrude Stein, who puffed out her feathers until she looked twice her size; but not just Gertrude exuded an air of freedom, everyone else did as well.  A calm descended on the chicken yard. 

Mommy’s human friends reminded her gently that the pecking order among chickens was real: that the domineering behavior she had witnessed, and felt distressed by, had to do with some primordial chicken DNA that she could expect to do nothing about.  Chickens insisted on having a honcho at the head of things, they said; a clutch of gang members who followed the leader in the middle; and then, at the end of the line of command, the smallest and apparently weakest of the flock, very often a solitary being, who was fair game for anyone who wanted to attack.

Mommy didn’t deny this perceived reality, but because of her own history of being one among those considered at the bottom of the human pecking order, she found it intolerable.  Something in her could not bear to let any other creature suffer just because they were smaller and weaker.  Besides, bullies were incredibly ugly, she thought, whether human or chicken, and it was an act of liberation for them and an introduction to them of their beauty to assist them in mending their ways.

What Mommy had not expected was the behavior of Agnes of God, side-kick and sister ruffian of Rufus.  During the first four days Rufus was gone, she rarely left her nest.  She had started out mingling with the other chickens, but half-heartedly.  She seemed stunned by their expressions of freedom and lack of fear.  She had dive-bombed and pecked every other chicken in the yard, with Rufus right there, backing her up.  Now Rufus had mysteriously vanished.  Her flank, therefore, was exposed.  She took to her bed. 

Mommy came into the coop to gather eggs.  Agnes, she said, what’s up with you?

Agnes made no reply, except to sit more stolidly, forlornly, on her nest.

It was clear to Mommy that she was missing Rufus.  Mommy wondered how that configured in Agnes of God’s mind?  How would it feel to her to lose the only being in the world who looked, smelled and behaved like her?

Mommy felt her heart begin to soften for both Agnes and Rufus.  She thought of the good things they did:  they protected the flock as well as they could from intruders.  They gave every visitor a wicked going over to be sure they were harmless.  They were not afraid to jump up in a human’s face if the human got too close to the other chickens.  They were splendid guardians.  Why, Mommy wondered, did being a guardian turn them into tyrants?

So she emailed her friends and asked them to bring Rufus home.  Would she have learned a lesson in humility, kindness and restraint?  Mommy could only hope.

Looking Deeply

The Chicken Chronicles: A Memoir

Sitting With the Angels Who Have Returned With My Memories

Chapter Thirty-Six

©2010 by Alice Walker 

 Girls,

Once upon a time when Mommy was a girl she went to stay with a friend whose husband was a batterer.  Mommy knew he had battered her friend while they still lived in Georgia, but now, in New York, her friend assured her he was a new man and never so much as threatened her.  She walked about the apartment they shared with an air of freedom and confidence.  Mommy was relieved. 

And fooled. 

It took weeks to realize that the air of freedom and confidence exhibited by her friend ebbed and flowed; that when she wasn’t drifting about the place looking peaceful and content, she was busily attuned to her husband’s moods and constantly trying to avoid interaction with him.

So it was with Gertrude Stein.  As Mommy was to discover.

Thinking of her friend from so many years ago, Mommy had decided to sit with you  twice in one day; once in the morning and once in the afternoon.

 In the morning all went well; there was the joy of freshness in the garden, as Mommy tilled and watered, while everyone in the flock pursued your own course.  Ever so much scratching and scattering of mulch as the search for insects and seeds kept you busy.  No time to fuss or fight.  But in the afternoon, enclosed once more in the chicken yard, with Mommy sitting attentive but still and silent on her little chair, it was quite different.  For one thing she noticed Gertrude Stein was spending quite a bit of time behind her chair.  Was she hiding?

Mommy moved her chair to one side.  Gertrude Stein came out into the yard but studiously avoided going near Rufus who was occupied eating the last bit of corn from an ear Mommy had brought for the flock to share.  Rufus had cornered it and everybody else stayed away.  When she’d finished with it, the rest of the flock approached.  But not, Mommy noticed, Gertrude Stein, who, as Rufus moved about the yard, managed to stay at least three feet out of reach.

Her body language was striking.  She seemed to shrink into her feathers, to become smaller, like Mommy’s friend who could appear to be two different people depending on her husband’s moods.

When Mommy drew some sunflower seeds from her pocket and tossed them into the yard Gertrude Stein had barely made a dash for them before Rufus, head lowered like a battering ram, ran her off.  She darted behind Mommy’s chair and stayed there.

Mommy was annoyed by this aggression. When she saw Rufus harassing another chicken over a bit of carrot in a corner, she threw a clay egg at her.  She had collected the fake eggs out of the nests and was cleaning them with a towel.  She missed everything but the ground, of course, but was intrigued to see how interested in the egg everyone became, seeming disappointed that, peck on it as they would, it failed to crack.

What to do?  Not about the fake egg, but about Gertrude Stein.

What in fact to do about the bullies of the world?  Mommy pondered. This was a serious problem, a humanitarian issue of vital importance, in Mommy’s opinion; Rufus was not the only creature on the planet making others hide behind chairs.

I wonder what would happen if we sent the bully away? She mused.  Thinking of global human bullies while considering the fate of Rufus.

Someplace secure and kind, for Rufus, she thought, but where she would not have her usual friends and familiar surroundings.  Where she would have to learn a few things, like how to be the only chicken among strangers and how to find a safe place to lay her eggs.  A place perhaps where there was a dog just territorial enough to keep her on her toes. A place where food was less generously provided, and not easily commandeered by her.

And so, Mommy sent Rufus away to spend a few days with friends and their children and their dog to see if being away from Gertrude Stein, Agnes of God, Splendor II, Babe II, Glorious II, Hortensia and the Gladyses, and away, as well, from an over indulgent Mommy, might encourage her to diminish or discard her ego-centric and aggressive attitude.

The Settled Mind

If the mind is always calm and still, dark and silent, not seeing anything, neither inside nor outside, free of all thoughts and mental images, this is the settled mind, which is not to be conquered.  If the mind gets excited at objects, falling all over itself, looking for beginnings and ends, this is the confused mind, which ruins the virtues of the Way and undermines essence and life - it should not be indulged.  Putting your nature in order is like tuning a stringed instrument.  If the strings are too taut, they will snap.  If they are too loose, they will be unresponsive.  When tautness and relaxation are balanced, then the instrument is ready.
Wang Chongyang

Day Two

Sitting With the Angels Who Have Returned With My Memories

The Chicken Chronicles: A Memoir

Chapter Thirty-Five

©2010 by Alice Walker

Elementary, my dear girls, Elementary!

The first thing Mommy did when she came the second day was consider where she could put a television for you to watch.  She’d heard chickens like television. She wondered what it was you liked about it.  Maybe the shininess of it and maybe because the shiny things within the shininess moved a lot.  She wondered if you’d peck at it.  Yes, you would.  Mommy herself never learned how to watch television; every time she tried it sucked her in.  She wasn’t strong enough for it, at all, and was thankful she understood that.  She was saving television and re-marriage for her very old age.  Seen from a distance they both seemed quite nice.  Nice, a word Mommy never finds much use for. For some reason it makes her think of pickles.

She still loves Daddee with all her heart, though.  So, not to worry.

She thought again of Thomas Hardy and how she appreciates his working class characters and how, in the BBC production of The Mayor of Castorbridge, in the very first scene, opening each segment of the story, there is a flock of free chickens running about the yard.  She wondered if this might be a program suitable for you.  But then she wondered if you’d even recognize the chickens as chickens and kin, though 19^th century kin, and whether the rest of the story would have any relevance at all.  Well. 

She didn’t see how she could rig up a television set, though she was happy that you have both electric lights and a wall heater, but maybe she could bring her laptop and treat you to the occasional podcast of Democracy Now?  You could peck at Juan Gonzales’ glasses and Amy Goodman’s shiny silver necklace. Then she thought about Nurse Jackie, whose story she had received via Netflix, and how you could help nurse Jackie gobble up those pills that keep falling out of the cabinet at the hospital.

Mommy collected all the eggs, first thing.  Before sitting.  Before sharing treats.  Before anything.  She collected them in her egg basket that was made in Ghana and has all the subtle seriousness of that artistic, though too hot for Mommy, country.  Having collected them, she placed the basket outside the chicken house on top of two bales of straw.  Then she settled into her meditation camping chair and put her feet up on the green stool and set herself to observing the scene.

Gertrude Stein, she noted, bobbed about here and there, plucky and matronly and certainly not exhibiting one iota of being a hacked down or diminished soul.  She was like a thrifty shopper in the market, choosing each morsel she put into her mouth with dignity and care. When one of the Gladyses attempted to snatch up a grain of Whatever It Was Gertrude Stein had her eye on, Gertrude Stein dive- bombed her, making an almost audible thunk against her neck.  Somehow, Mommy mused, I don’t think being attacked by the other chickens is Gertrude Stein’s problem.

Mommy realizes she overuses the word enchantment when she writes about you, but that is the truth of the time she spends sitting with you.  The world could end in a thunderclap and she would hardly stir.  She loves the way you drift over to her chair and how you nestle close beside her for your naps.  You do that funny squat that you also do when she chases you around the garden, just before she picks you up to return you to your yard.  But now, instead of simply squatting, with wings stiffly elbowed out, you fluff out your feathers, peck underneath them, and snack on any critter you might be harboring; sometimes you appear to lose your head, holding it for several seconds, serious and intent, under a wing. 

But what charms Mommy is how happy you seem to be to feel her presence on the chair beside you.  Actually Mommy would sit on the ground but the low-slung chair gives her perfect support should any of you decide to jump on her knees or on her shoulder, which brings you closer to her earrings and glasses.  You have an interesting habit too of pecking her clothing on which there is nothing visibly edible.  Mommy thinks maybe this is the way chickens show affection, and why a kiss among humans is sometimes called a peck.

Time passes and Mommy knows she is drifting, with you, in Eternity.  That this is what being present really means. 

When she prepares to leave, after an hour has stretched to an hour and a half, she almost forgets the egg basket she left outside the yard on top of the bales of hay.  Taking it down she notices one of the eggs has been pecked open by a bird she did not even see.

Perhaps it was the complaining bird of yesterday who returned unobserved to watch her collect the eggs and place them outside the chicken yard.  It saw its chance and took it.  At least now she knows who is responsible for breaking into the eggs, if not for eating them. That bird, or another.  She had noticed that one of the chickens napping closest to her chair the past two days, and blinking up at her from time to time with a look of sweet innocence, is Hortensia.

The First Day

Sitting With the Angels Who Have Returned With My Memories
The Chicken Chronicles: A Memoir
Chapter Thirty-Four
©2010 by Alice Walker

Dear Girls,

As soon as Mommy sat down to observe what was going on with Gertrude and those missing feathers at the back of her neck, she realized how tired she was.  Mommy comes from a long line of people who were forced to work almost every moment they were awake (they were called slaves though of course they weren’t slaves to themselves but rather the enslaved); there was a saying in her parent’s household when she was growing up: idle hands are the devil’s workshop; though enslavement of people of color had ended a hundred years earlier.

Mommy thought of patterns of behavior, how ingrained they can be, how unnoticed also, though there we are, stuck in them, frequently without knowing.  She had always worked hard and actually loved it; it was simply a part of her.  But gosh, she thought, as she settled into her meditation camping chair, how tiring working so much of the time could be!  Her ancestors who had no choice about when and where to work were often in her ear advising her to chill, but she was usually too headstrong and stubborn to listen.

She thought of all the hammocks she owned and how she enjoyed them; also of how little time she actually spent suspended in their deliciousness.  It was curious, this self-observation, and for some reason, maybe because you were beginning to dig into your dust holes and nestle in the earth for naps, it made her sleepy.

She decided to put her feet up.  For this, she needed to take down the green stool and place it under her legs.  Settling into this position was heaven.  Several of you: Agnes of God, Splendor II, Babe II and a couple of Gladyses came close and hunkered down beside the chair.  There was a fifteen-minute pause in everyone’s activities.  Mommy knew it wouldn’t last and that was fine with her.  She wanted to see what was going on between Gertrude Stein and everybody else.

Before she drifted off though she thought about the bliss of sitting with you; how unexpected it was; how exquisite.  Did the rest of the world not know about this?  Had humans known about it – sitting blissed out with chickens – and somehow lost it?  The peace.  The sense of being in synch with the entire enchilada.  Her mind drifted to the ease with which, sitting with chickens, one slipped off the wheel of Samsara.  There it went, rolling down the hill, and the observer not caring a flying Huskie one way or another.

Mommy was already delighted by the thought of not coming back around again in human form – what a blessing that was – but she had mused over the possibility of coming back as Something: maybe a hummingbird or butterfly.  Maybe a carrot or zucchini.  Maybe a breeze.  A breeze was probably her favorite.  But now she knew Nothing at All would be just fine.  Like a long, long sleep in perfect darkness that never ended.

As she was thinking this she was also looking at Gertrude Stein who was scratching deep into the dust bowl she’d made and fluffing her feathers until they were saturated with dust.  It was so lovely to Mommy that chickens had sense enough to know clean dirt wasn’t dirty.  That you could bathe in it.  Next to her was Rufus, who resembled Bobby, the soul mate she’d lost, and Mommy wondered if their similar markings (both Bobby and Rufus were Barred Rock ) made her more acceptable to Gertrude Stein.  Or perhaps Rufus was the one pulling out her feathers.

 However, nothing alarming seemed to be happening now.

What happened soon though, maybe because the chicken yard became so quiet, is that a bluish bird with a long beak, not, Mommy thought, a Blue jay, alighted on top of the chicken house.  It eyed Mommy and the snoozing or dust bathing chickens.  Mommy pretended to be asleep, but she kept her eyes peeled under nearly closed lashes.  The bird seemed to understand the scene and, instead of flying down from its perch and into the coop where the eggs were, it flew off.  Complaining to its partners, whom Mommy could not see, as it went.

There’s a human in there! It seemed to shriek.  Bummer!

After napping and bathing, everyone staggered up again and began to question Mommy about whether she had some treats.  You’re already very fat, she said, but in fact, in her backpack, she had brought down a few pieces of corn on the cob.  She wondered if you would like it slightly cooked as much as you liked it raw.  You did.

Mommy has a horror of blaming anyone for something they haven’t done, and so she couldn’t be sure the bird was guilty, as she thought might be the case, of pecking holes in the eggs of the chickens.  How was she to find out?